The warlike climate hovering over Europe's informational and emotional life has mitigated seemingly minor local news, such as the fact that, according to the latest Idescat 2020 population report, Barcelona has lost a total of 28,000 residents in a single year. The news is not surprising (the country's capital has bid farewell to 120,000 souls in the last eight five-year periods), but one does not need to be a statistical genius to see that our city is slowly bleeding out in terms of population. The same information source states that in Catalonia, births fell by 20% due to the pandemic (I won't talk about deaths, as it's Saturday and I don't want to spoil your day), but very often intuitions turn out to be more accurate than data; readers will know of many friends, acquaintances, and people they've greeted who, for various reasons, will have fled the sky-high rents, stress, or air pollution of our city.
A few days ago, I ran into a former International Relations student (24 years old) who had pursued a prototypical academic career that would lead to working in any multinational or company in the world and who, to my surprise, told me he was working as a farmer in a village an hour away from Barcelona. The anecdote is categorical; the tribal media recurrently broadcast news of young people fleeing the precariousness of Barcelona by embracing a kind of neo-ruralism that allows them to inhabit small self-sufficient communes, enjoy a high quality of life, and telework from a farmhouse where they cultivate their garden. Even if surveys only partially reflect this (Idescat itself states that Barcelona residents aged 15 to 24 only decreased from 142,803 to 142,223 in the last year), there are increasingly more young people who, having been educated in Barcelona, see no incentive to stay in their neighborhoods.
This servant is more Barcelonian than the tiles of the Eixample, but he perfectly understands the kids who leave the city, a phenomenon to which we must add most of my contemporaries (especially those with children), exiled from Barcelona because life in the outskirts is 40% cheaper for them. Let's start with a basic idea; most urbanites naturalize the discomforts of living in a city environment because places like Barcelona give us more stimuli, culture... and money than Palafolls or Flix. The problem occurs when, apart from a slow stagnation of cultural infrastructures, economic stimuli disappear. This is the case of my former student, who explained to me how, logically, he preferred to live like a king of the jungle in his rural house, earning little more than a thousand euros, than killing himself working for a company in Barcelona for 1,200 with schedules close to slavery and a permanent intern status.
This neo-ruralism of people raised in Barcelona, I insist, is not an adolescent stance nor a psychiatric effect of the pandemic. Logically, our young people flee from a city that, for now, they find almost aggressive. This position is even more worrying if, as in the case of my former student, we are talking about young people who know most European cities firsthand, since they have benefited from the very low prices of continental flights. I understand that, for many of our current political representatives in the City Council, understanding the vital dynamics of these Barcelonian exiles may be more difficult than putting themselves in the shoes of a Bengal tiger. But what I am telling today goes beyond what the pretentious call youth policies and labor incentives. I repeat it for the deaf and blind: people flee from Barcelona because the capital has long ceased to give them any stimulus.
This neo-ruralism of people raised in Barcelona, I insist, is not an adolescent stance nor a psychiatric effect of the pandemic. Logically, our young people flee from a city that, for now, they find almost aggressiveApart from culture and prosperity, cities stimulate us by providing a vision of the world and solid values that structure the skeleton of our soul. One must live quite deluded to think that, for now, Barcelona represents a stimulating project for future generations.The person who signs the article, I repeat, is a son of the Grid who must ingest anti-allergics when leaving the Meridiana in the direction of the AP-7 (I am not exaggerating), and the few times I leave the city I experience a sensation between nausea and boredom that is difficult to explain. But today I am writing to you from a place an hour away from my beloved city, from a house that, without any luxury, I could almost buy for the same price as the rent of my apartment in the Call, and today the market ticket did not reach half of what I pay (very happily) to my dear stallholders of Santa Caterina.
You see. If even I, the most pompously Barcelona thing you can imagine, start to feel comfortable away from the city... well, I'd say we have a problem.
PS.- Mayors of the (depopulated) towns on the outskirts of Barcelona; if I were you, I would start giving away uninhabited farmhouses and plots of land to young exiled Barcelonians. From them, and who would have thought it, the future of your small town may depend. Listen to me, this small present exile looks like a future stampede. Unfortunately.